Changing Catholic Schools In ChicagoColumn

In the following excerpts from an essay published in the Chicago
Tribune, the writer Eugene Kennedy places in its historical context the
plan of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago and Cardinal Joseph
L. Bernardin to close at least six of the archdiocese's schools:

The people and priests who sacrificed so generously in the 19th century
to build what is now the Catholic Church in Chicago made no small
plans. They constructed and staffed churches and schools where none had
previously existed to meet the educational and spiritual needs of
largely immigrant flocks.

This vast, energetic, and authentically visionary undertaking
succeeded beyond any prophesying of it. Out of its parishes, schools,
and universities rose a well-educated people who, in this generation,
have claimed their rightful place, dreamed first for them by their
forebears, in the professions and the arts as well as in public service
and private business.

The success of the pioneering Catholicism of the last century
demands the kind of vision, as bold as that which begot it, that is
being offered for the next century by Joseph Cardinal Bernardin.

After years of consultation with representative members of the
clergy and the laity, Cardinal Bernardin has rightly concluded that
Catholicism as a faith can no longer live in the style that it
achieved, indeed longed for, as an aspiring and ambitious immigrant
culture. Were the spiritual reality of Catholicism tied inexorably to
any specific historical period, no matter how glorious it may have
been, it would long ago have shriveled into a memory as fragile as last
autumn's fallen leaves.

The changes that Cardinal Bernardin and his collaborators now
propose recognize that the Catholic Church can no longer afford and
should not try to house itself in the architecture of a wonderful but
bygone era. ...

What Cardinal Bernardin is saying is that the Catholic Church must
now draw on its imagination rather than only its memory if it is to
serve its people and its community in the 21st century. His scheme of
action, in beginning to consolidate parishes and to develop regional
schools as well as to examine the possible sale of all property,
including his own residence, recognizes that Catholicism must change
its vesture in order to preserve its essence.

Writing in the winter issue of the Heritage Foundation journal
Policy Review, Patricia Summerside notes that despite low funding for
schools in South Dakota, students in that state rank near the top
nationally on test scores and graduation rates.

A former research analyst for the South Dakota legislature, Ms.
Summerside argues that the state's experience demonstrates that "money
doesn't matter" in education:

This does not mean that reforms [aimed at emergency situations] are
ill-advised. Where the educational system has a dead battery, it needs
first of all to be jump-started. Many states in educational trouble
also have large numbers of children in poverty, and school reform may
help establish a positive dynamic for self-improvement.

But states like South Dakota tell us that the best way to improve
schools is to build a sound social infrastructure. We can't expect a
student to be excited about learning if her school is a diploma mill or
his personal life is in chaos. That's why strong families that stay
together, small schools that are community centers, and old-fashioned
values produce educational achievement.

Families, small schools, and old-fashioned values are very probably
the most effective institutional incubators for many other desirable
social outcomes as well, from low-crime neighborhoods to productive
economies to civil public discourse. If we really want these things, we
cannot afford to take their prerequisites for granted.

We cannot pretend that all lifestyles are equally valid or that the
answer to every social problem is more government bureaucracy. We have
to give healthy, small-scale, time-tested social institutions our
active support; we have to consciously resist their political erosion
and their cultural delegitimization. Otherwise, we will be trying to
grow plants without roots.

In an address to education-school juniors beginning their
student-teaching last month, Jon Westling, interim president of Boston
University, stressed the importance for teachers of continually
advancing their own learning:

[T]he vocation you have pledged yourselves to requires more than a
little learning. It requires more than the traces of information one
passively acquires from television, from casually read books, from
in-service training, and from the steady passage of what is sometimes
called "life experience." The real learning to which you must dedicate
yourselves if you are to become genuine and excellent teachers is
learning for the sake of honest understanding.

Unless you have the capacity to be awed by the mystery of things,
you will not seek knowledge. Unless you have the humility to realize
how little you know and how much there is to be known, you will be
satisfied with superficial and second-rate knowledge. Unless you find
pleasure in stretching your mind, you will soon weary of the
effort--both for yourself and for the task, which is in some ways even
more difficult, of stretching the minds of your students. ...

For teachers do not purvey merely a specialized body of professional
knowledge and skill: Whatever else you teach, you will inevitably also
teach yourself--who you are, what you know, where you are going.

You cannot avoid being an exemplar to your students of what it means
to be learned. There is thus nothing that you can learn--from history
and literature to ornithology and economics and neurobiology--that will
not enhance your effectiveness as a teacher.

The obligation of schools to satisfy the demands of their public
constituency on the one hand and to meet the needs of classroom
practitioners on the other helps explain why many reforms recur over
and over again without substantially altering the "regularities" of
schooling, writes Larry Cuban, professor of education at Stanford
University, in the January-February issue of Educational
Researcher:

The unique organizational characteristics of this tax-supported public
bureaucracy governed by lay policymakers merge with the imperative to
retain the loyalty of the system's constituencies. Both help to explain
schools' obvious vulnerability to pressures for change from external
groups. ...

To ensure that the organization is both efficient and effective, the
district has a bureaucracy to coordinate what occurs in classrooms and
elsewhere in the system. Any departures from policy and procedures are
scrutinized. ...

The tight coupling vanishes, however, when it comes to the core of
schooling: classroom instruction. ...

Inspections and tests are the standard bureaucratic tools used to
control what teachers do in their classrooms. But teachers work as solo
practitioners, isolated from their colleagues.

Administrators, who depend on teachers to achieve any degree of
school effectiveness, basically trust their teachers' craft. They do
formally evaluate teacher performance a few times a year, but both
parties to the process report that the occasions seem ritualistic even
when high stakes are involved. ...

Testing is the other bureaucratic means for controlling what occurs
in classrooms. Teachers give their students tests frequently. Most of
these are teacher made or linked to textbook assignments. Seldom, if
ever, are the results of these tests used to gauge teacher
productivity. Although standardized achievement tests are ubiquitous,
it is rare that student scores are used to assess individual teacher
performance. ...

Decoupling classroom teaching from administration and policymaking
in the organization occurs because policymakers and administrators need
to retain the support of practitioners while maintaining the district's
credibility in the eyes of the families that send children to school,
citizens who pay taxes, and state and federal bureaucracies that
monitor district actions, teachers, students, and others. ...

Here, then, is an organizational perspective ... that begins to
explain why certain school activities and teaching are insulated from
externally driven pressures for fundamental changes.

Vol. 09, Issue 26

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